[matthew]

The financial centre of Toronto is an anomaly in a city where a huge number of people live downtown. Home to nobody, after office hours whole blocks of the city sit almost completely deserted. The basements of the bank towers are all linked and form a shopping concourse larger than any above-ground mall in the province, yet outside of business hours almost all of the 4 million square feet of retail space is dark and shuttered. Seventeen miles of tunnels are occupied only by a scattering of people passing from one place to another, or the occasional worker providing maintenance or security. It's a strange and unusual place that's designed to serve the immediate needs of daily crowds, but it sits empty most of the time.

In short: it's a great place to try out a hasselblad on a very cold sunday morning.

These photos are softer than they should be because of rather excessive curl in the film. (I have a better film holder coming Real Soon Now™.) The series and these photos are still fairly rough – they were taken less than 36 hours from the time that I'm writing this. That's not nearly enough time for anything to season, but I wanted to show the early results from the 'new' camera while they (and I) are still fresh.















All types of comments, especially critiques, are alway welcome.

[nia]

Dear Matthew, you know I am not a professional one and even not a good photographer yet! But I should say these are wonderful photographs, the lights, and the reflections very well, especially I liked these reflections... I think you got a wonderful results with your new camera,

Thank you,
with my love,
nia

[Zig]

Brill: d'you know, sometimes I'm sure we get a camera that lends itself to taking pics that we'd simply not have a go at before. I remember with my Pentax I was shooting stuff in the knowledge that it would look tonally attractive...but that I'd never dream of shotting with the previous camera as it'd come out bland and non-descript.
This HB renders so well, doesn't it? I love the subtleties of tone and the generation of such a lot of varied and pastel mids. That first one above is great: poise and balance and composition...and you just seem to have slipped into "seeing" in square format too: so often I've seen square shots turn out as being truncated 5x4s
By the way, was this a Fuji print film you used? Did you make any exposure compensation?
I ask this and making a wild guess that it was, and as such I may be on the totally wrong track...., but I remember that some Fuji films(and moreso in slides) had quite irridescent greens and also their ISO rating was a little ambitious by up to a1/3 stop(for instance Velvia 50 really needing to be exposed at 32)...and shadows would block out quickly if exposed at the manufacturer-recommended ISO.
Is this focal length something like 90mm or so? Jolly nice lens...and to be honest, I do think you've got your eye in at that format pretty quickly, despite your suggestion that the shots were a bit rough and ready. I'd love to see more, really...go on Matthew: lock the others away in a cupboard for 30 days and force your self to just use the HB!

[Toad]

There's something about that lovely square format that really works for architectural shots. Nicely done.

[Irma]

Beautiful pictures Matthew. I like them all but #3 is the one that takes my heart... I don't know why but I like it a lot. I think this format fits excellent to your photography. Your compositions look so natural but at the same time so stylish.

How was the jump from format 2x3 or 4x5 to a square frame? Did you find it easy? I don't remember to have seen many 2x3 pictures from you anyway. Do you think you would have seen these compositions with another camera that is not square format?

[Zig]

Yes, that's it: Irma has put it so simply: natural yet stylish. Yep.

[matthew]

Nia, thank you; you're both kind and modest.

Zig, good call on the lens. It's roughly an 80mm equivalent diagonally; it's hard to be specific with the different picture shape, and all of these have been cropped in a little, making it narrower than the focal length would suggest. (There's an involved, complicated look at the issue of focal length equivalents here.) The film is actually a new formulation of Kodak Portra negative/print; this was only third roll of it in 120 format, and fourth overall. Winter is more of a monochrome time of year. And I completely understand what you mean about how certain cameras can open up subjects that wouldn't work with others - which is a good thing, because I have so many of them. No wonder some of them have earned nicknames; I have about eighteen lenses that fit eight cameras in six different mounts.

Rob, thanks; I hadn't really thought about the subject except that it was empty, convenient, and warm, but the corridors and columns works out unusually well.

Irma, thank you very much; I appreciate your thoughts.

And thanks everyone for your comments on the square format. I'd read a lot of conflicting opinions before I got this camera, some saying that squares were their first love, others that they're very difficult to compose and end up with wasted space. Not to sound immodest, but when I was looking through these first couple of rolls, I was very pleased to see how they'd turned out.

I suspect that part of it is what Irma touched on - I haven't been with the 3:2 aspect ratio for very long, and never exclusively. Most of my photography has actually been with 4:3 ratio sensors, first with Sony and then Olympus, and now with my Panasonic cameras. For that matter the 6x8 format of my Fuji is just a 4:3 ratio in disguise. While I've never sought out the 1:1 ratio in-camera before, it is what I use for most of the product photos on my review blog. So even though this format is new to me, it's not as different for me as it would be for someone who has 'grown up' on 135-format cameras and their descendants.

Ah, about the exposure - I knew there was something I'd missed - the `blad that I have relies on an external meter, which isn't the most reliable since I'm the one using it. My usual rule is simply to ensure that there's plenty of light hitting the film, but in this case the improvised supports that I was using in fairly dark conditions - typically 1/2s, f/8, @iso320 - wouldn't let me be overly generous. But because the exposure can vary so widely from shot to shot, I have my scanner software set to 'auto levels', which centres the tonal range toward averaged values. This creates a low-contrast scan with a lumped histogram that I then pull and push into shape within Lightroom. So with the variables of the metered exposure, the actual exposure, the scanned brightness, and the finished tonal range, the whole concept of 'exposure compensation' goes out the window. But the beauty is that I can always go back to the original and rework it from the ground up should I ever need to. I did do that for one of these, which the scanner got wrong on the first pass, and I should have but didn't for another one, which I was able to work into a 'good enough for the web' tonal range.

[Zig]

Really useful further details there; thank you.
Does the "variable exposure" workflow allow as much informed control over colour balance as you'd wish? I ask, as given that we have the "destructuve" process iof actual exposure rather than an infinitely tweakable assemblage of uncompressed data in a raw file, surely colours may shift and change in unfamiliar ways and at variable rates?

[matthew]

Colour is a funny thing. It's just a simulation in either branch of photography, but if I want to I can scan the unexposed regions of the film and lock in the colour of the film base, essentially fixing the white balance to the film's native colour. (The same process can be done to set the brightness, essentially locking the exposure as well. When I'm scanning 35mm (with its built-in accurate metering) I'll do both for colour, and just the latter for B&W.) A hybrid darkroom, film that's scanned, is just layering electronic interpolation on top of the chemical interpretation, but the end result works fairly well.

Using transparency film would give me an original colour reference that I can take from screen to print, but the actual colour captured remains an approximation through chemistry.

I save my film scans as 16-bit-per-channel dng raw files, and even though I downsample the flatbed MF scans before saving, they're still massive. All of the usual Lightroom controls work perfectly, making it easy to use the eyedropper (etc) to get the white balance right where I want it. And of course all of the H/S/L controls work normally, even though I don't use them very often. I've found that the files I edit are far more flexible and forgiving than those from my D700.

[Zig]

Ta Matt...my, that last sentence surprises me. Phew!
I was going to ask you about tranny film, funnily enough, in terms of "do you think you'll use tranny film..?..."
I realise it is very unforgiving in terms of exposure before shadows start to block.
Since going digi..and moreso since the 1Ds2.. I've become so lazy about metering, yet with the Pentax 67 always spot-metered from grass or a grey card.(I've even set my own custom function with the 1Ds so it defaults to its narrowest spot-meter when set to manual, knowing my habits, yet have not used it once).
Do you see yourself getting much more "meter-aware"?

[Wedding Shooter]

Love the repetitive patterns in these Matt. Number three is just a little distracting with the line through the middle of it. The last shot is my favourite. Nice choice of subject.

[matthew]

Chris, thanks. I agree on number three - and also dislike the line sticking up on #1, while I'm on the subject - and couldn't decide if I should just focus on that line, which is one of those tension barriers. The focus point is the nearest square stool (an easy target for a split-prism) and wish I'd gone with just a little more DOF. As it was, I got shooed away by a security guard shortly after taking #3.

#4 and #5 were both taken with the camera balanced on a trash can. Love those things.

Zig, transparencies are wonderful things. Looking at a sheet of transparencies after wading through a stack of orange (colour) or purple (xp2) negatives is like unexpectedly discovering that you're on a tropical beach instead of in our dreary northern winter. The colour, the light - it's fantastic. But like a tropical beach, getting there can be unusually expensive.

There's been a lot of text without much to look at here, so this is an image that didn't make the cut:



I offer this as an example of metering and scanning. I took a reading from the brighter light around the shoe-shine chairs, and then set up my camera position. The exposure (on the negative) is good, but when the scanner (sloppily set to auto-levels) hit the mostly dark scene, it irretrievably burnt the highlights on the ground. But that's a simple fix - I nudged the brightness down in the scanner software and then re-saved the image into Lightroom. With that done I was free to change the exposure controls, tone curve, and add some graduated effects to get the image where I wanted it.

I have found myself getting more aware of metering and light. I've started playing a bit of 'guess the exposure' for the first time, especially for gauging interior light levels. I took a properly exposed photo of action that was out a window and across the street by estimating that the light was about the same as it was the day before. That may not be a huge accomplishment - overcast days don't change much - but it's a big change from how I'm used to working. With all of my digital cameras (except the D700) my only consideration has been to adjust the exposure compensation for atypical scenes, while with my Ikon (except with Ektar film) I only care about whether the light will let me use the aperture I want and if it's fast enough to avoid camera shake. I can hear the difference between 1/60 and above, 1/30, and 1/15 and below - I completely ignore the Ikon's meter. So in a very real way, and especially considering my usual subject matter, these medium-format cameras are the first time I've really had to pay attention to the characteristics of pre-existing light.